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Faculty Q&A

Mark Shepard on Digital Media and the Near-Future City

Work featured at 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale

Putting 'Natural Intelligence' in the hands of the people: Mark Shepard and his collaborators observe the Venice Mussel Choir, a water quality monitoring system that 'sings' daily water-quality readings taken from a canal, at the 2012 biennale in Venice.

Published
February 11, 2013

Two of our faculty members — Joyce Hwang, assistant
professor of architecture, and Mark Shepard, associate professor of
architecture and media studies and co-director of the Center for
Architecture and Situated Technologies — participated in
the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, the most prestigious
architectural exhibition in the world.

Their projects were featured as part of the award-winning U.S.
Pavilion, “Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the
Common Good,” which investigated the future of the American
city through a series of 124 small-scale urban interventions. We
sat down with Joyce and Mark to learn more about their research and
get their take on this year’s American exhibition.

Q: “Spontaneous Interventions” exhibited
124 socially-minded projects — small-scale, temporary and
unplanned — designed to address areas of urban life
undermined by conventional practice. What problematic urban
situation does your project address, and what solutions does it
propose?

“In the near future, finding our way from point A to point B will not be the problem. Maintaining consciousness of what happens along the way might be more difficult.”

Mark Shepard, Associate Professor

Department of Architecture, Department of Media Study

MS: Both of my projects address the projections and
promises of the so-called “smart” city and critically
examine the implications for everyday urban life. The Sentient City
Survival Kit is a collection of playful and ironic artifacts for
survival in this near-future city. Serendipitor, one item in the
Kit, is an alternative navigation app for mobile phones that helps
you find something by looking for something else. The app combines
directions generated by a routing service (in this case, Google
Maps) with instructions for movement and action inspired by Fluxus,
Vito Acconci and Yoko Ono, among others. Enter an origin and a
destination, and the app maps a route between the two. You can
increase or decrease the complexity of this route, depending how
much time you have to play with. As you navigate your route,
suggestions for possible actions to take at a given location appear
that are designed to introduce small slippages and minor
displacements within an otherwise optimized and efficient route.
Here, the intent is to reintroduce forms of play and mobility in
the city that are at risk of being undermined by this highly
optimized, ever-more efficient and over-coded city.

The Venice Mussel Choir addresses the question: what if the
“smart” city we are promised by corporate interests and
government agencies turns out to be not so smart after all?
Building self-contained models or other representations of
irreducibly complex urban ecosystems is neither the only nor the
most strategic way to exploit sensors and the computational
opportunities of the ‘Internet of Things’. Yet the
promise and projects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to produce
intelligent systems has led to certain cultural expectations and
misreadings of the critical opportunity we face. Natural
Intelligence (NI), by comparison, is a paradigm that couples
feedback from natural systems into social systems for ongoing
interpretation and information. NI locates and displays the
information within the community for whom it is most relevant
— rather than being first and foremost for the centralized
databases of government agencies and regulatory bodies.

The Venice Mussel Choir is a water-quality monitoring system
that “sings” daily waterquality readings taken from a
canal bordering the Giardini Publici. Using a scientifically proven
technique involving a hall sensor and a rare earth magnet attached
to the shell of the mussel, it is possible to detect changes in the
gape of its shell over time and subsequently extrapolate its
response to local water conditions in situ. The public workshop we
conducted in Venice introduced the issues and challenges related to
waterquality monitoring, and demonstrated how to build a
water-quality sensor using mussels. A prototype system
incorporating an array of these mussel sensors was submerged into
the canal near the Riva dei Partigiani pedestrian bridge. Data from
these sensors was used to generate a song performed by synthesized
voices (the Choir), vocalizing changes in the water quality of the
canal. My collaborators on the Venice Mussell Choir were Natalie
Jeremijenko (director, Environmental Health Clinic, New York
University) and David Benjamin (director, Living Architecture Lab,
Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning
and Preservation).

Mark Shepard's Serendipitor is an alternative navigation app for mobile phones that helps you find something by looking for something else.

Q: This new design ethos is often participatory and
open-source. How does your project engage the community in this
process of remaking our city?

MS: Both of my projects are built upon open-source
technologies and involve participatory models of interaction for
their realization. Each is fairly specific in the way that
participation is structured, and how the different communities are
engaged. In the case of Serendipitor, the app builds on conventions
of interaction with GPS navigation systems and lodges its critique
within these very conventions, as enacted by the participant as
they move throughout the space of the city. rather than being first
and foremost for the centralized databases of government agencies
and regulatory bodies. Doing so puts the information in the hands
of those who can take actions directly informed by it.

Q: Spontaneous Interventions — in fact, this
year’s entire biennale — reflects a sense of optimism
about the power of the architect and designer to effect change by
deploying unconventional tactics that create more meaningful,
accessible and sustainable places. Do you agree? How do you see
this movement happening around you — here at our school and
in Buffalo?

MS: I think we see with exhibitions such as Spontaneous
Interventions that architecture is a very broad field occupied by
specialists and non-specialists alike. Many projects exhibited in
the U.S. Pavilion were not produced by architects but by teams of
artists, activists and citizens who have taken matters into their
own hands and are shaping the city in perhaps small but significant
ways. This is especially evident in places like Buffalo where
organizations such as People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH
Buffalo) are doing great work on the West Side. What we are seeing
is a shift from top-down, centralized to bottom-up, distributed
initiatives that are proving in many cases to be more agile and
effective in achieving a desired outcome.

Mark Shepard on Tools for Survival in the Near-Future City

Q: Can you take a moment to share with us the
origins of your project, and how this work emerged? What are future
directions for this research?

MS: I’ll be conducting a graduate design
research studio on this subject later this spring that takes the
City of Buffalo as both site and context for a series of
experiments in minor urbanism conducted by students from UB’s
Department of Architecture and Department of Media Studies,
together with students visiting from the Bauhaus-Universität
Weimar, Germany, within the framework of the new International
Media Architecture Masters Studies Program (IMAMS). The studio will
also engage in a collaborative workshop with iDAT, a lab for
creative research, experimentation and innovation across the fields
of digital Art, Science and Technology at the University of
Plymouth, UK. Outcomes from the studio’s research will be
featured at MediaCity 4: MediaCities, an international conference
exhibition and set of workshops to be held in Buffalo from May
3–5, 2013, which I am organizing together with my colleagues
in the Department of Architecture and Center for Architecture and
Situated Technologies: Omar Khan, associate professor and chair,
and Jordan Geiger, assistant professor.